- Year
- 2024
- Medium
- Acrylic on canvas
- Dimensions
- 73 × 73 cm
Part of the Muscle Memory series.
Insensitivity to Smell is concerned less with things getting worse than with what happens when we stop noticing that they are getting worse.
When we are exposed to a smell for long enough, we gradually begin to notice it less. The smell is still there; what changes is our response to it. The body pushes what it encounters continuously into the background.
I wonder whether something similar happens on a social level.
Violence, inequality, war, displacement, economic pressure, political rhetoric, or the growing exhaustion of everyday life, many things that initially disturb us can, through prolonged exposure, become part of what we consider ordinary. The problem does not disappear; our sensitivity to it simply decreases.
Perhaps one of the most powerful qualities of systems is that they do not always need to convince us. For a social order to be accepted, people may not need to believe that it is right. Sometimes, living within it for long enough is enough.
Because what we call normal is not fixed. As conditions change in small increments, the boundaries of normality move with them. Something that seemed unacceptable yesterday can be debated today, explained tomorrow, then managed, and eventually absorbed into everyday life.
In this sense, the power of a system does not exist only in its rules, institutions or authorities. At some point, our own capacity to adapt may also become part of what allows that system to continue.
The question here is not simply one of indifference, nor of failing to see what is happening. The more unsettling possibility is that we see it perfectly well, but no longer feel the same response to it.
Human beings can adapt to almost anything.
Is this a mechanism for survival, or a process that gradually weakens our ability to question the conditions in which we live?
And if we can no longer smell something, is it because the smell has disappeared, or because we have been breathing it in for too long?
